Summary

In this TED Talk, Netflix's chief marketing officer, Bozoma Saint John, talks about the importance of looking past the data and, instead, using your intuition as a way to success. She makes a powerful statement in saying that data is the pill we take to calm our insecurity about our intuition. Saint John argues we need to be liberated, i.e. to liberate ourselves from 'the endless weight of data' stopping us from moving into the future because data ties us to the past. She talks about the beginning of her career, where she was taught that data would be extremely important to the success of her ideas. A little later, however, Saint John went to work for Spike Lee and his advertising agency. There she was strongly encouraged to use her intuition to help produce what turned out to be some very successful advertising campaigns—including Pepsi. Saint John's takeaway for leaders and marketers is this: 

Decrease the dosage of data we rely on and increase the implementation of our intuition. Data is, after all, information collected from the past, while intuition looks to the future. 

See link: Transcript of Saint John's TED Talk

 

Worth noting however, that there  are a number of TED Talks which focus on the importance of data, especially egineering, see: 15 Must-Watch Data Analytics TED Talks